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How To Win At The Funfair Part 4

Lucky Lotto

The lotto, pick tickets, lucky dip, call it what you will is a long established game based purely on luck, or is it?

The principle is easy enough, you pick a number of tickets out of a container, open them and if you have the winning number, (usually any odd number) you win a big prize. A modern variation imported from the continent is the 21 game, where your tickets need to add up to 21 to win, this encourages repeat playing as you can keep your tickets and add to them.

The reality is slightly different, there used to be rogue operators, who never had winning tickets in the pile (very rare nowadays as with social media etc they are quickly marked out as being impossible to win on), but how it works now is that the tickets are stacked into bundles, with a pre selected number of bundles containing the winning tickets, these are then carefully fed to the players to regulate the number of winners and to try and keep the crowd interested by having enough winners come out on a regular basis to look like its easy to win. Once the stall becomes really busy then its a self perpetuating thing, that many tickets are being sold that winners are appearing every couple of minutes. The operator can keep the fever pitch going by surreptitiously slipping winners into the bundles they are starting to hand out.

Even operated this way it is a game purely of luck so there isn’t that much you can do to increase your chances of winning.

If a lotto stall has a large crowd viewing it but few players, then the operator will at some point seed a winning ticket out to try and draw the crowd in, so you probably have a higher chance of winning then, or when the stall is really busy, winners will be coming out more often due to the higher throughput of tickets, so that will slightly increase your chances.

The easiest way to gauge your chances of winning on any funfair stall, is simply to look at the value of the prize, if a prize is worth say £25, then common sense should tell you that the operator has to have more money come in from the players than the prize is worth, otherwise he goes out of business. The old come on of a super sized teddy bear with a sign saying me if you lose should tell you that the game is almost impossible to lose on (It would be illegal to be impossible, so it is made merely “Almost” impossible) and so therefore you are virtually guaranteed to win, trouble is the prize for winning will be a little tiny version of the Teddy bear worth much less.